[dns-operations] root? we don't need no stinkin' root!

[Dave Lawrence]

Paul Ebersman writes:
> mallman> I wonder if we're ever allowed to just decide this sort of
> mallman> thing is ridiculous old shit and for lots of reasons we can and
> mallman> should just garbage collect it away.
> 
> We aren't allowed as IETF/engineers. The world sort of is. ;)

I see the :) but I'm thinking the first sentence is serious.  

Given the consensus model of the IETF, I absolutely think we're
allowed to decide we no longer have to be backwards compatible with
everything in perpetuity. We can certainly roll out a spec which
mandates, to the IETF's best ability to mandate anything, a behavior
that is known to be problematic to ancient software.  Of course we'd
take into account just what sore of problematic that is and the
relative risk involved in coming to a decision about whether it's
acceptable, but I've never seen a hard requirement that "ridiculous
old shit" work indefinitely.

The rest of the world's developers and operators can of course decide
whether to go along with the new spec, exactly as they always have
been.